“I used to be an adventurer like you. But one day I was wounded in the knee by an arrow.” The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim has one of the most mythical phrases in the history of video games. It has been used as a meme for many years and has even found its way into different audiovisual works. You don’t have to go far to prove it: id Software introduced a reference to this phrase in DOOM (2016).
Its popularization attracted many people. While some preferred to joke or simply take it as a mere detail, others struggled to find meaning in it. The most widespread and erroneously accepted is that the arrow stuck in the leg means that the soldier got married (marriage) and that is why he cannot continue having adventures.
It is not us who deny it, but Emil Pagliarulo in 2021. This man was design director of Skyrim and more recently of Starfield. Almost nothing! It was then that he said that the phrase was designed to be one of those inconsequential comments that the NPCs in the world have, this is how he explains it an official Bethesda publication:
I remember that it was very late, so late that it was almost dawn, and we were in the middle of developing Skyrim. I was putting in a lot of phrases from the guards. It was the same process that I would use years later for the guards in Fallout 4. I tried to make it funny and quick comments, things that would give a little more interest to their conversations. That’s all.
In this case, I thought it was something interesting and also credible. That it made sense that they had hit him with that crush at some point and now, semi-retired, he was dedicated to walking around the city like the typical bitter cops in the movies.
Finally, Pagliarulo broke the myth: this is a literal event. Receiving an arrow in the knee in Skyrim does not symbolize marriage or the action of kneeling to propose, but literally having an arrow stuck in the knee. Sometimes an arrow stuck in your knee is just an arrow stuck in your knee.
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